If You're a Press's Managing Editor, Be Glad You Didn't Receive This Email

It's not often that I go off like this, but rarely are rancid pieces of meat dropped in my lap by publishers that should know better.

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Letting you know that I'm about 60 percent through the text, then it's tackling the notes, which will be largely rewritten top to bottom, using whatever resources I can get to. I didn't know that that would be expected of me going into the project -- or more specifically that you'd be doing it if I didn't. That's not your job, or shouldn't be. When the production transmittal said to leave the book alone, I can largely do that with the running text, as it's interesting and well-written, as long as one overlooks this writer's apparent lack of vocabulary for introducing quotes. I'm changing some of that. And it still needed a thorough technical copyedit/scrubbing.

If it were me, and it's not, I'd tell [the copyeditor/typesetter originally signed up for this project] that this job is being sent to someone else for typesetting. She shouldn't be able to pick and choose what aspects of the job are easiest for her. If she bitches about any of my copyediting decisions, she can go straight to hell.

And I'm going to say in my notes to you that most of my publishers, from talking with those acquiring editors to whom I have access, would immediately send back to the author a manuscript that had these kinds of notes to do their own fucking job, or their contract would be void. It's not up to the press to make the book complete; according to style, yes, but filling in a million blanks, no. These notes are a total fucking embarrassment, prepared with the least amount of effort required, and anyone associated with [insert well-known university here] presenting this as sufficient work ought to be hanging their head in shame. I'd love to be one of [her] students and shove this unedited manuscript back in her face. It's a fucking travesty.

Production Editors and Expectations of Copyeditors

Correspondence sent recently to a managing editor

I'm not holding this against you, although you can hold against me the lateness of the project, because it's ultimately my fault. But please, never again tell me a project is in good shape unless you know it firsthand from reading it cover to cover—and if that is never destined to happen, that's perfectly fine by me. I'd just as soon go into a project blind as with wrong expectations, because it then messes up my schedule and the publisher's schedule when the assessment of the manuscript is incorrect. I've got literally seven different projects in various stages of completion, partially because this thing wasn't off my desk much sooner. Again, my fault entirely. I start feeling weird if I have two projects going simultaneously. And this one seems to get worse as it gets further; maybe it's just me.

Don't, however, cut this guy any slack. First-time published authors who aren't great writers and who construct a manuscript full of citations as if they're not familiar with the form shouldn't get to dictate how their manuscript appears with a publishing house of your stature. I don't care who this guy is. He should be happy y'all care enough to make him look better.

Sample Queries for Offensive Content

From a social club's history, the first blurb is the massaged version of the original text; the italics are my response.

Freelancer's hint: Send correspondence like this in a separate email, so the recipient doesn't, hopefully, foul up and forward it to the client.

> “had worked as a volunteer tutor for the primarily Appalachian students at the community after-school center.”

I have severe problems with their use of “Appalachian” as a euphemism here, and for what, I’m not quite sure. The Appalachian Mountains stretch from Maine to Georgia and include a lot of highly gifted students, and a lot who live in poverty. If what they mean by “Appalachian” is poor white trash from Eastern Kentucky, they need to find another way to say it than they have.

> “To form a collective to promote educational, social, artistic, and literary growth, and work to meet to the city's best interests . . . ” Updated in 2018 to reflect more contemporary language, the current mission statement describes the group as “organized to enrich lives through philanthropy and education.”

I call complete bullshit: Should read, “Updated in 2018 to placate the conservative Christian Trumpsters among them so that they can disavow any need to live up to helping society or the arts one bit, except when it suits their purposes.”

> “They have seen a Torah up close and toured a museum with Jewish cultural artifacts.”

Well, bully for them. Do they just want to come right out and say they do not now, nor will they ever have Jewish members? Oh, [city named here] . . . full of German descendants . . . right. If they have a Jewish member, they’d do well to change this bit of content. 

Author Should Have Quit While He Was Ahead

"Pair up in dyads."

Theological Lattice

Indexing consecutive books, one of which is rather intolerable and dense, while the next is breezy and ethereal. First is where Christian theology meets nuclear physics. Interconnectedness. Second is where Christian theology meets Zen Buddhism. Interconnectedness.

Monk at Gethsemani to blogger six years ago: "People keep trying to fit themselves into holes. They need to look at what's behind the holes. The rush to organized religion will ruin you."

Catch of the Day

The song titled “Half Breed” and recorded by Cher in the 1970s resulted in great strides being made in overcoming, if not totally eliminating, the presence of this stigma. Like Cher, my mother was not afraid of her heritage; in fact, she was quite proud to be a Native American and always wore her heritage as a badge of honor. [QY: Note, from imdb.com: “Cher is of Armenian heritage on her father's side, and of English and German, with more distant Irish, Dutch, and French, heritage on her mother's side.”]

That Ain't Right

I've received what looks like an interesting book for proofreading.

Page count: 235, of which 93 pages are endnotes.

My interest in this book has just cratered.

"Brown Shoes Don't Make It"

What doesn't make it in this case is citing a relative's unpublished manuscript.

Bonus points for readers who can identify the source of the title quote. Webz search verboten.

Leave me a comment with an answer, or an insult, or a special favorite you want to hear. Gets lonely occasionally here in blogland.

Today's Gripe

Although as an indexer, I'd be perfectly delighted, because I've never worked with a publisher that didn't include such pages in the billable page count.

But, why, o lord, is it necessary to have 11 pages of Works Cited for 24 pages of text? I wonder if some of these scholars aren't being paid by the citation. I also wonder where they are leaving room for original thought.

Authors! Listen Up!

1. Using Roman numerals for chapter numbers does not give your manuscript more weight. If you need any reminders, keep this picture in mind:

2. The more italics you use, the less they mean.

3. Don't invent your own citation style. It won't help.

4. Speaking of citation styles, don't use what would appear in a law journal unless you're writing for a law journal. If you're a lawyer writing on a different topic, get over it. No one wants to read citations full of emphasis on the wrong information.

5. If you plan on compiling your own table of contents, write it after the rest of the book is finished to ensure that the text matches up.

6. Punctuation helps, and using it properly is crucial. The marks guide your reader through your thought process. Without punctuation, you have no structure. And without structure you have

Glasses don't work for you either, dearie.

I got my issues with Democrats, too.

Just sayin'.

No Surprise

I'm indexing a book that basically says, as the Firesign Theater once noted, "Everything you know is wrong."

Indexing negatives ain't easy, either.

Snowing here.

UPDATE 1/21/2016: The book, while not a classic, is rather entertaining. It's eviscerating a lot of horseshit scholarship.

I Am So Avoiding Work

Epigraph of the day:

In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics.
--David Runciman (2014)

Sooo, I'm indexing this rather horrid monograph that was and is so painful that I interrupted the index to proofread a book from the same publisher by a world-renowned philosopher whose name I've see in a hundred bibliographies. That good book come and gone, I'm down to the last 50 or so pages of the horrid one, and every five I go, another 10 seem to add on. Like eating vegetables as a kid. And, of course, there was the typical lattice of coincidence, as the topic of the book for indexing wove in and out of the book for proofing.

The difference in scholarship between the two is like a line from Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren about a hot 40-something, what today might be called a MILF, if I'm using the term correctly. From her 20-year-old daughter: "People look at me like I'm a raisin and at my mother like she's plum pudding."

I've not done the calculations, but I suspect that as a percentage of income I'm now more of an indexer than a proofreader or certainly a copyeditor, which has its pros and cons -- one of the cons being that of the three things I do, proofing and copyediting are more or less enjoyable, yet every index is a chore.

How you say . . . beggars/choosers?

Getting a Bit Pungent in Here

First new book of the new year. I'm 28 pages into it (arabic numerals), and the author is still telling me what the book is going to be about. Given that the Methodological Notes begin on 211, I'm in for an epic round of wheel-spinning over the next 180 or so pages, stuck in horseshit. And why do I get these books for indexing? If I was proofreading it, I really couldn't care.

Happy new year.

Word of the Day

relume

Main Entry:re£lume
Pronunciation:(*)r*-*l*m
Function:transitive verb
Inflected Form:re£lumed ; re£lum£ing
Etymology:irregular from Late Latin reluminare, from Latin re- + luminare to light up — more at  ILLUMINATE
Date:1604

 archaic   : to light or light up again  : REKINDLE

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Well, the Beverly Hillbillies thing ended up being a bust -- as was most of this seemingly promising book. Easy proofread, disappointing content.

Y'all come back now. Ya hear?

Oh, Those Wacky Academics

Even though the topics may change over time, much of my labor still involves pressing my nose to the trappings of supposedly informed discourse: footnotes (or author/date citations) and bibliographies. Nothing like editing 12 hours of such documentation to the exclusion of any running text. But I guess that's a production decision.

Such citations are important, one is given to understand. My grad-school son and girlfriend were at the house during finals period in the spring and had me giving their APA documentation in a semester-end paper the once-over.

One of my esteemed publishers -- esteemed because they send me paychecks, albeit a bit sluggishly -- has me edit the text and then deal with the author's review of my copyedit. In other words, I get to see what edits they override, what mistakes I overlooked (he writes, mea culpingly), and what they choose to ignore.

I'm presently reviewing a manuscript that I sent back to the publisher in October 2014, for chrissakes, and the author just managed to get around to reviewing the text. That cutting edge dulls a bit with time, buddy.

Routine queries involve places in which the author/date citations don't match up with the bibliography or where the author should be citing a particular fact.

Author for this book has simply deleted many of the queries where the information disagreed -- and deleted the citation itself as well. Simply too busy to do the legwork, I guess. So now what appears? Either what seems like an unsubstantiated fact or a wee bit of something that smacks of, uh, violation of fair use -- or perhaps lack of intellectual integrity. Is there a nicer word for that?

A representation of a null set, so the site sez

Put Out That Candle, Diogenes

I've said before somewhere on this blog that when I mention to a press that I think a book's got problems, the press is usually aware of it already.

New indexing client, and I was so bold as to offer this slightly edited in-progress report:

"The index is presently running about 26 double-spaced pages, short of the allotted 34. I didn't try to hold back on length when indexing. As any of my clients can tell you, if anything I'm usually trying to cut my original data drastically to make the text fit. I think the length is more a factor of the book's organization. The author is fond of the 'say what you'll say, say it, say what you've said' approach -- not only within chapters but through the whole book. Too, the same ground sometimes seems to be covered in two or three places (at least), and as an indexer I'm not fond of sending readers to multiple pages only to find the same information. I hope my approach is okay. I've also tried to follow the press guidelines on not trying to outline the book or capture every detail. Having said all that, I don't feel that someone looking at the index would conclude that I'd cut any corners."

Response (slightly edited)

"Thanks for this update, Bob. Your approach to indexing this book sounds right. You don't need to hit the max no. of pages. This author's dissertation advisor should have steered him away from this topic, which sounds good but is almost impossible to pull off and still do justice to all the issues involved. So I'm not surprised at the vacuity you have encountered. We rejected the ms at one point, but a 'friend of the Press' thought we should reconsider."

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"Vacuity." That's some harsh stuff.

The De-Spiriting, or Taking the Wind Right Out of My Sails

It's not worth much, but these days I self-identify as a Taoist-leaning Jewish agnostic -- one who still spends a lot of time up to his eyeballs in Christian theology. MDivs and people who hang around enough Sunday school classes or Saturday morning Torah studies with the rabbi will note the punning in this posting's title. To bring the rest of you heathens up to speed, the word for "spirit" in Hebrew is ruach, which means "wind" or "breath." Greek = pneuma. Same. Think, "pneumonia." Or you could think, "Jesus Christ, doesn't anyone read this stuff?"

The clock says 1:40am, about the same time it was three or four days ago when I discovered paragraphs repeating pages apart and the FUBAR situation known as "indexing implications."

Same thing happening now. Is it Groundhog Day? Four places in the book where paragraphs repeat. And in this case, there's no "near the end of the chapter" possibility that could pull this author's butt out of the sling. For some reason, he wrote this book -- some pneumatological ruminations -- in diary form. I have no idea why. The diary begins around April 2 and ends around November 29. I have no idea why. Is that average "normal time" in the Christian lectionary? Frankly, I don't care.

So the book has no chapters. The "diary entries" run in one after the other. I was wondering when I opened the PDF why this usually sensible press was publishing a book with no table of contents. Now I know. And I also know that it's now 1:46am on a Sunday morning, and while this managing editor might check her office email later today, there's not a damn thing she can do about it either. I have to presume in a book of this relative brevity the repetition is intentional. This author has, according to Amazon, eight books to his credit. I'm proceeding full speed ahead with the index. Let Rev. Smartypants substitute some text.

I mean, this happens so rarely -- so twice in four days is by any standard appalling. By the time I see these books, they've been vetted in-house (one hopes), copyedited (one hopes), and maybe even proofread while I'm doing the index. They may have even been through a stage or two of page proofs. No one notices? Admittedly Land on Demand has some screwy methods of operation, but certain benefits accrue to sitting down with a project and trying not to move my ample white butt until the thing is finished. At least I can remember what happens 30 pages apart.

Time to fix a cup of coffee. Presuming no other freakouts, I should have this wrapped up by dawn. Oh, for some career alternatives. Or a winning lottery ticket. I'd take the latter and probably still proofread. No stress. Read a book, point out mistakes, and send it back. Life used to be simple, not that I remember it.

Bad Timing

Partially it's my own fault. Whether it's the eight-day workweek or using up all the time my deadlines allow, I find that the most crucial questions that would allow me to proceed safely with a job come at times when it's least likely I'm going to get an answer.

One of my ongoing fears deals with a managing editor who's become a dear friend -- and who is actually one of the folks who admits to reading these little jottings. Since he knows my MO, I occasionally expect him to slip a note buried about two-thirds into a job that reads, "Bob, no matter what time of day or night, call me and leave me a message when you read this note." And it would be 3:30 in the morning the day the job is due, and the response to the message would have some essential information for going forward. Or he'd just want to bust my chops for leaving his work for the last minute.

But he's not alone, not that it should provide him with any solace.

Another common occurrence is that I'll have a more or less regular week going, then pick up a manuscript at 5:10pm on Friday that clearly has some fatal flaw 10 pages into it. Of course by that point, most normal people -- as a good friend once called them, "saps with a day job" -- have gone home, not to check back into their daily grind until Monday. Actually, my friend above, while far from a sap, is one of those who actually has a life outside the office. If one of these jobs ever came from his desk, I knew I'd just be better off putting it away until Monday morning.

I was indexing a book on the graveyard shift last night, and the book started presenting with difficulties. Paragraphs repeating from one chapter to another. Sentences repeating within a paragraph. All kinds of copyediting miscues that I'd have cleaned up or queried as a proofreader, but as an indexer aren't necessary my responsibility.

However, paragraphs repeating is a legitimate big deal at this stage, because you can't just take out two paragraphs on page four of a 40-page chapter halfway into a book. That results in the rather moderately phrased SNAFU known as "indexing implications."

Note to all you newcomers to publishing. If you're dealing with a book in production, and something comes up that has "indexing implications," it generally ain't a pretty sight. Either pages need to be reflowed if text comes out, or the author needs to submit new text to fill the same space -- in which case the indexer might proceed with his work, but the managing editor has to write index entries, not to mention re-proof those pages, when the new copy is set.

Here's the thing, though. If Land on Demand had its proverbial fecal matter together, I wouldn't be doing this job on the graveyard shift the day it's due (actually, gulp, the day after I told the author I'd have the index). I'd be doing it a few weeks before, giving the author and the press time to come up with solutions and maybe even tell me to stop work and await a new set of page proofs from that point forward. That's no fun either. Picking up writing an index after a forced break must, it seems to me, be part of one of Dante's levels of hell. I typically can't remember what book I invoiced two days ago, much less remember the entries and subentries I've started setting up a week or two ago.

Interesting book, though. I remember a few years ago hearing that someone had discovered that his VCR or DVR had what seemed to be a miniature camera facing out of it. I'd always thought that such a claim could only come from someone who'd just returned from a visit to the tinfoil hat store. Turns out that Samsung has admitted that some of their later-model TVs indeed were outfitted with cameras and microphones that could be activated remotely -- and that a watchdog group had cautioned about positioning such units facing your bed.

This public service announcement brought to you by the Luddites local union 23. Don't stay tuned.

A Gem from an Awful Book

et all

Yeah, I guess that works.

Straight from Central Cast(e)ing

Finishing a gruesome tome about India, and I came across the concept of "upper-class peasant." Not sure where such folks fit in the grand scheme of things, but frankly it doesn't sound like a bad way to be. For all I know, I've just endorsed something horrific. Let me know if I'm wrong -- and how it might be any better or worse than working on this damn book.